The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

“It shows that you can’t tell history—whether it’s the history of the past 50 years or the past 500 years or the past 1000 years—without paying attention to the role of the environment. The environment is not something that’s happening on the side of history. They’re intertwined, and you can’t separate them out. The book shows this really compellingly. It illustrates how events that we might think about as completely unrelated were connected through the environment. For instance, Amrith mentions research suggesting that the European invasion of the Americas that started in 1492 with Columbus contributed to the Little Ice Age that lowered temperatures all over the world. Perhaps the freezing over of the Thames in the 1600s was caused in part by the conquest of the Aztec empire on the other side of the Atlantic a century earlier.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize

Rebecca Earle, Historian